The Playwright's Journey: From First Spark to First Night

By Jemma Kennedy

A clear, supportive and comprehensive guide to writing a play – based on the author's long-running playwriting masterclasses, as taught at the UK's National Theatre.
This book leads you through everything you need to know, including:
-The theatrical tools and techniques you can use to bring your play to life on the stage (and how these differ from writing for film and TV)
-Discovering and trusting your writing process, with a range of approaches for developing your initial idea into a completed script
-Understanding your characters, including their goals and central conflicts, and using emotional logic to connect them to your story
-Finding the dramatic structure and theatrical setting that best suits your play
-The key elements of constructing a great scene, including how to invoke tension, deepen characterisation and create effective transitions
-Writing engaging, active dialogue by finding each character's voice, balancing exposition with subtext, and rooting what a character says in their specific context
Throughout, you'll find examples from classical and modern plays, plus insights from other contemporary playwrights into their own writing journeys. Each chapter provides a set of exercises to help you practise what you've learnt.

There's also advice on what to do once you've finished your script – including redrafting, receiving feedback and taking notes – and how to navigate your play's progress towards production.
Whether you're an emerging playwright or embarking on your first-ever play, The Playwright's Journey will help you develop your creativity, strengthen your connection to your material, and transform your idea into a fully formed play that feels alive on the page – and the stage.
'A very, very smart book which left me nodding in sage agreement with every chapter... [Lays] bare the most complex, convoluted ideas with exquisite lucidity, wit and empathy... A substantial and rare aesthetic achievement which every aspiring playwright, producer and director should read and respect' Joe Penhall
'Kind, good, sane and useable advice, brilliantly written' Blanche McIntyre

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Jul 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781788503945

Jemma Kennedy

Jemma Kennedy’s plays include Second Person Narrative for Tonic Theatre's Platform initiative; The Gift, part of the Hoard Festival for the New Vic Theatre; The Summer Book and The Prince and the Pauper for the Unicorn Theatre; The Grand Irrationality for the Lost Theatre Studio (Los Angeles) and Don’t Feed the Animals for National Theatre Connections 2013. Jemma was Pearson Playwright at the National Theatre in 2010 and part of the inaugural Soho 6 writing scheme with Soho Theatre Company in 2012. Her novel Skywalking was published by Penguin/Viking in 2002. Jemma has acted as a writing mentor and judge for the National Theatre’s New Views playwriting course and competition for young writers, and teaches playwriting at the National Theatre’s Clore Learning Centre. She has also mentored writers for the Koestler Trust.

Book preview

THEATRICAL STORYTELLING

Plenty of people who have an urge to write drama will aim for the stage first. It stands to reason. Practically speaking it is generally far easier to get a play staged than it is to have a TV series commissioned or a screenplay optioned – not least because the latter both cost so much to produce. This is one of the reasons there is no ‘fringe’ television, no ‘black-box’ cinema and far less of the admirable energy and innovation that we see from ‘let’s put on a show’ theatremakers (although of course digital technology is making this more possible in film and TV). Plays can and do flourish in pubs, hired rooms, public buildings and, increasingly, in site-specific locations. I once saw a memorable series of short Tennessee Williams plays staged in a hotel room for an audience of twenty. The theatre is also a great training ground for new writers because it allows them access to actors, performance spaces, rehearsed readings, and a strong writing community.

This is all good – theatre should feel accessible, egalitarian and doable. But sadly it doesn’t mean that writing a play is easy – or that all plays should in fact be plays. There are plenty of films that have begun their lives as plays, and novels that have been adapted into plays, and more and more films that end up on the stage, too. But don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security. I read lots of new plays that should probably be novels, and some that should be poems, and even more that are really television shows. And most of them share a key characteristic, which is a distinct lack of theatricality.

WHAT IS THEATRICALITY?

This concept often baffles writers new to playwriting. Doesn’t the fact that their story is performed on stage in the presence of an audience make it inherently theatrical? The answer is an emphatic no. Theatricality is a term that covers the broad set of tools available to theatremakers, present in physical stagecraft and in writing craft. These tools will always be utilised in a good play. Even an apparently realistic play will employ deliberate theatrical techniques which are present in the writing as much as the performance. In the theatre, the gap between ‘actual’ reality and the reality represented on stage can be very small or very large.

As an example of the latter, the play that Simon Stephens crafted from Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time uses movement, music, graphics and lighting (performative theatrical devices) to allow the audience to experience life through the eyes of its hero Christopher, an autistic teenage boy (although the condition is never explicitly named in the book or the play). There are also theatrical devices written into the text by the playwright, including the fragmented non-linear timescale, and the scenes between Christopher and his teacher, where we experience his life as written in a book for a school project. This particular play and its staging has a high level of thrilling and sophisticated theatricality. It’s easy to see why the novel became a play, with some clever theatrical thinking by playwright and director.

At the other end of the spectrum is realism – ‘life imitates art’ theatre – which is still the dominant form of modern Western theatre. These sorts of plays aim to depict a real situation, with linear shifts forward in time and place, in order to mimic reality as closely as possible. (Linear storytelling is a presentation of events in their chronological order as they happen.) It is often also known as ‘fourth-wall’ theatre: the action on stage is surrounded by three walls, with the audience positioned where the fourth wall would be, as a privileged but unseen witness. An actor would never ‘speak out’ and address the audience (which is known as ‘breaking’ the fourth wall) – because it disrupts the convention that the audience actually isn’t there.

An example of this is Joe Penhall’s play Blue/Orange, which creates a realistic depiction of a couple of days in a psychiatric ward. We meet two doctors, one junior, one senior, and their patient (who also happens to be called Christopher). During the play we witness the two doctors clash over the right treatment for Christopher – is he ready to be released from the hospital or not? One doctor thinks yes, the other no. The play, which has three acts, leads us through a day and a night in the hospital; as each doctor interviews the patient and fights their corner, we learn that each has their own personal agenda with regards to Christopher’s diagnosis.

So where is the theatricality in this play? It is everywhere. It is present in the heightened dialogue, which may sound completely realistic to the audience, but on close inspection of the text turns out to be far more poetic, structured and deliberately rhythmic than ‘real-life’ dialogue ever is. It is present in imagery and symbols embedded in the text – not least the blue orange of the title, which creates metaphorical meaning for the audience. It is present in the three-act structure which gradually allows the audience to change their alignment from one doctor’s argument to the other’s and, finally, perhaps, to Christopher’s. It’s a far less formally theatrical play than Curious, but it is just as theatrical in its essence, its play-ness.

Blue/Orange is a theatrical exploration of a political subject played out by personally conflicted characters, set within realistic constraints; Curious is a theatrical exploration of the interior state of one particular character, whose experience of life is externalised in action, both realistic and profoundly expressionistic. Both are plays; both are theatre; both succeed on their own terms.

THEATRICAL STORYTELLING VS CINEMATIC STORYTELLING

After its successful run in London, Blue/Orange was turned into a film for BBC Four, which was a very faithful adaptation of the play. But it’s worth noting the key differences in both forms. The play has one setting: the treatment room. All the action takes place within it. In contrast, the film has many locations, as well as a slightly different time scale. The breadth of visual storytelling is far greater in film – audiences generally get bored with one setting and a lack of spectacle, and there are very few films that successfully use such contained and constrained time and place. Because, as a rule, we are far more familiar with film and television narratives than theatrical ones, it can take a while to train yourself as a playwright to imagine onstage action in your plays without the lens of cinematic reality. To the untrained eye, a play’s basic action and spectacle can seem very simple, and very achievable.

Let’s take the iconic shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho as an illustration – it’s easy to find online if you don’t know the film. The character Marion is enjoying a hot shower. We see her, framed from the shoulders up, under the jet of water. We (the camera) look up into the showerhead. Back at her. Then we pull back to show a menacing female figure appear in silhouette behind the opaque shower curtain holding a knife. She yanks back the curtain. Now Bernard Herrmann’s famous chilling music starts – and we see Marion scream. The camera zooms in in extreme close-up on her terrified face and open mouth. The mystery killer begins to slash at Marion with the knife. Hitchcock uses a fast sequence of different camera angles here to portray the chaos and violence as the killer attacks Marion – including the ‘point of view’ (POV) of the knife slashing downwards – and then blood darkens the running water in the bath. The killer disappears. We zoom in on Marion’s hand sliding down the tiled wall, before ending on her dead face, eyes open. It’s widely regarded as a masterpiece of visual storytelling. (Of course, although we consider film to be a far more ‘realistic’ medium than theatre, it is still a carefully constructed montage of visual fragments that creates an illusion of reality. I’ve been told that Hitchcock shot the forty-five-second scene over seven days using eighty different camera positions.)

As an experiment, try watching a film or TV show some time with the sound turned down, and see if you can still understand what’s going on. In a good film there is a mass of information that is conveyed purely visually; for example, a close-up on an actor’s face to convey emotion; a shift in location, time or place to show us that time has moved on (e.g. from day to night). Now imagine sitting in the theatre and watching an entire play with your ears plugged. How much could you understand? You should be able to detect action, however subtle, through the arrangement of the space and the movement of bodies through it, and find meaning created in the physical setting. You’ll probably also be able to guess at certain relationships by how people physically interact – but the subtle intricacies of the play’s meaning will be lost. The action or spectacle may appear static, visually simplistic, even dull.

But open your ears and everything comes alive. Dialogue – and the use of language in general – is the playwright’s great tool, and one that is pushed to its furthest capacities in theatre, far more so than in film or television. We’ll look at this in more detail in a forthcoming chapter.

Back to our Psycho sequence, which creates crystal-clear meaning and narrative without a single word of dialogue spoken. Could we replicate Marion’s murder on stage? Yes. That is to say, we could easily show a woman on stage taking a shower, who is disturbed by a killer and violently stabbed to death. But our experience of watching the same action would be entirely different – and, perhaps, far less disturbing. Why? Because the tension and fear created by the film version comes almost entirely from what is not shown. The camera shots, editing and music create a cinematic subtext that a stage production cannot replicate. The eye of the camera is intimate, privileged and detailed, and it moves wherever it wants.

A theatre audience has a very different communal eye. Although we are skilfully manipulated by some of the same elements – lighting, blocking, physical action and dialogue – the panorama of the stage is generally static, and action ebbs and flows into it. We can’t zoom in and out like a camera can, or privilege the audience perspective in the same intimate way. There’s a good reason why certain filmic staples are very rarely shown – and rarely work – on stage. Sex is one. Dying is another – by which I mean actual physical death. I can think of a few great death scenes: Shakespeare was, of course, pretty good at them (though there’s a bit too much talking), and the Greeks knew how to throw a gory punch. Seán O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars has a devastating one. Chekhov was fond of the offstage gunshot. But we rarely see as many bodies drop and blood spurt as we do in the cinema, certainly not often in contemporary drama. These things are hard to stage, hard to act, and often seem melodramatic.

Somebody clever, whose name I cannot recall (feel free to write and tell me if you know the original quote) said, ‘Classical drama tends to ask, What’s going to happen next? (i.e. it is plot-driven.) Modern drama tends to ask, What’s going on right now? (i.e. its drive is psychological/emotional/behavioural.)’ Modern stories for the stage thrive in the realm of the psychological. Death is present in much great drama, but more often at a symbolic level or as an offstage presence. If Psycho is ever adapted for the stage, I’d imagine a clever director could create some sort of visual spectacle to mimic the iconic moment, but the play would live or die according to the onstage tension between the key characters. And that would make use of playwright’s craft. Subtext. Complex behaviour. Symbolism.

THEATRE IS ACTIVE

Of course, it takes time to learn these sorts of elements of playwriting craft. And it’s hard not to be influenced by filmic storytelling. This can sometimes lead the developing writer to unconsciously borrow from film and television as a kind of shortcut to creating theatricality. I’ll often hear new playwrights describing their play like this: ‘It’s set in an airport and it uses video projection to show planes taking off and landing to create an airport atmosphere.’ Or, ‘My play is set in a remote forest in America in 1950, and a bus depot in England in 2011, and I’ll have a filmed backdrop to represent the forest and a bus on stage to represent the depot.’

There’s nothing wrong with the desire to shift between theatrical realities. And in principle there’s nothing wrong with video projection to help create a world or setting – many productions do this successfully using highly stylised staging. (Theatre companies Frantic Assembly, who worked on the Curious adaptation, and Complicité are masters of this.) But these sorts of devices, which use the camera to help create an onstage reality, can often function more as a safety net for the inexperienced writer: I’ll show moving images to the audience which will allow them to fully understand my context and give the work a visual veracity. And this can be dangerous.

Why? Principally because audiences are far cleverer and far more active than we might imagine. A good writer, director and creative company will easily convince an audience that they’re watching both 1950s natural woodland and modern Britain, using only a bare stage and a few lighting and/or music cues. In the theatre the audience is already primed to accept a heightened theatrical version of reality with the most subtle sleight of hand. The language, flavour and tone of the play, plus costume, staging and so on, all help create this theatrical reality. Try to remember this when you’re writing so that you don’t end up spoon-feeding information to your audience, leaving no room for their collective imagination.

Also remember that no two performances of a play are ever the same. From the moment the curtain goes up, the audience enters into a creative contract with it. We collectively agree that this chair is a tree. This woman is a child. This is sixteenth-century England. We are asked to participate in the reality, and we do. (Or don’t, and will probably leave at the interval.) Actors will often talk about a sense of creative transaction that takes place between audience and performers in the theatre.

This is because we shape the performance in our live reactions. When we laugh, gasp, or react emotionally to a single moment in a play, that moment becomes part of the organic fabric of the collective experience. Actors will react, and hinge off a reaction. They will alter their timing – pause, suspend, stretch, or quicken – like an orchestra responding to the baton of a conductor. This creates a wonderful sense of active participation by the audience and provides a creative, almost spiritual transaction between the preacher (i.e. the live storyteller) and the worshippers in the pews (i.e. the live audience).

Here is our first case study, in which a writer allows us to share in his process and give an overview of the genesis, development and execution of his play.

CASE STUDY: Coma Girl by Hinrich von Haaren

Hinrich brought his play Coma Girl to workshop in my class at the National Theatre. I’m going to let him describe how he went about turning his original impetus into a play in his own words – starting with his own synopsis.

SYNOPSIS

A girl owes money to a doctor.

The doctor and his sister want their money back.

A young man is hired to threaten the girl but things go badly wrong.

The girl is beaten into a coma.

The young man’s girlfriend thinks he should be paid for the job anyway.

Who is culpable? Who can shift the blame? Who will be punished?

The initial idea for the play came from a story a friend told me. She had bought a flat, and the tenants were refusing to pay the rent. On the way home, my partner and I were joking that our friend could hire someone to ‘rough up’ the tenants a bit. This was of course ludicrous as our friend is the sweetest person. But something about the incident stuck in my head and I carried it around with me for months. Firstly, this was because my own reaction surprised me. As someone with a left-wing moral conscience I would have usually sided with the tenants. Only suddenly, in this case, I found myself on the side of the person who was making the money. Secondly, it was because I couldn’t stop wondering just how far certain people might be willing to go to get what they want.

The initial draft was only about twenty minutes long, but it gave me the basic outline for the play. It really helped to have a concrete event that everything revolved around (a girl is injured accidentally in a fight and goes into a coma). From this event I spun out three different story strands. They were their own individual stories involving individual characters, but they were all linked in some way to the girl in the coma.

The play became a series of two-hander scenes and the central event (the violent act that puts the girl in the coma) takes place offstage. It’s only ever talked about. Keeping that big action offstage gave me the opportunity to show it from a different character’s perspective in each scene, through their retelling of the story. So you get partial information about how or why it happened in each scene and then the next scene might contradict that narrative. I wrote the first draft very quickly, then left it sitting in a drawer for ages, and finally took it to Jemma’s playwriting class at the National Theatre.

After we workshopped the play, I started revising. But first I had some actors over, and we did a read-through at my house. All the things I thought were terribly clever and funny sank like lead balloons. The scenes that I thought were mundane because the dialogue was seemingly about nothing worked the best. So I went back and cut, cut, cut.

Another important thing happened when we did the reading, which was that the actors (there were six of them initially) asked how I saw the play being performed. I had an image of all six actors being on stage together, and realised that this was far too large a cast for a new play to have a reasonable chance of production. I looked through the play and saw that I could double the actors quite easily as the scenes were all two-handers. So I decided to make the play for three actors only. I also realised that this would make the play more theatrical.

Hinrich is a published novelist (in German, his first language, along with other European translations) and I asked him how, when a new idea for a story landed, he went about deciding if it had greater potential for a novel or for a play.

With Coma Girl, I knew from the start it would be a play, because I saw all the characters existing in one space together, although in different locations, for the whole duration of the story. Whether it would ultimately be staged like that or not, I don’t know, but the sense of single contained space and time was very strong. I also knew that the absent coma girl was a sort of physical void that would bring all the characters together. That would never happen in a novel, because I’d want to describe her, take the reader there and get inside her head.

Also, when I have an idea for a novel it usually starts as a much bigger sprawl involving more characters and situations, and I have to slowly evolve a plot from those elements. I see the characters in ‘real’ situations and I also hear them thinking – I sort of tap into their inner thoughts. But with a play, I immediately hear characters speaking out loud. I sort of feel my way through the story using their verbal interactions – and silences – it’s a kind of dialogue that you don’t find in prose or on screen. There’s more freedom for me in writing a play than a novel – it’s a very ‘playful’ process. I can write short scenes and move them around; cut things up and puzzle them back together.

In a way, for me, knowing a particular story has to be a play comes from understanding the story’s limitations. That it isn’t necessarily epic, that it should happen in one room and be contained by its setting as well as by its central idea. There’s some sort of tension that I feel when I imagine the characters speaking that can only be experienced live, not described in prose or by a close-up of a character’s face. That tangible sense of a story’s theatrical potential is quite elusive really, but I’m getting better at spotting it early on!

Hinrich’s play went on to win the Nick Darke Award in 2016.

As you can see, Hinrich found the opportunity to create theatricality at various stages of the writing process. Early on, he hit on the idea of using three actors to play six characters (one that is generally unique to the stage). This turned out to have several functions. Firstly, the doubling of actors added to the comedy of the play and its absurdist, darkly comic tone, as well as its entertainment value; audiences take great pleasure in watching versatile actors inhabit contrasting roles. Secondly, it helped underpin the play’s themes about mistaken identity and moral weakness in the characters’ entwined fates. This device does have its challenges. A literary manager who read the play astutely commented that the doubling of actors with such a small group of players might end up seeming glib. Could the audience invest properly in the characters with such an overt game of theatrical ‘pass the parcel’? Time will tell, but it was a good starting point for marrying story, theme and form.

Another key choice was Hinrich’s decision to make the central event of the violent attack on the girl an offstage event that we never see. Although this might fly in the face of conventional wisdom and invoke the usual set of worries about basing a play around something that involves a lot of telling but no showing, it was actually a smart move. The bungled accident that led to the coma girl’s hospitalisation is far stronger left to the audience’s imagination. Presenting the same central event from three different points of view also allows the audience to make an active choice about which character’s version of events is the true one. The retelling of the accident, in this case, becomes not only a plot device but a central theme in a play that is both an existential whodunnit and an exploration of personal and social responsibility.

If you steadily interrogate your material as you write it, like Hinrich did, you will find the spaces that will allow for theatricality in performance. But be true to your vision for your play, however simple or small or plain that might seem in comparison to the work of others. Don’t embellish your script with unnecessary theatrical flourishes just to try and give it a stagey pizzazz – these may have the opposite effect of weakening your script if they’re not germane to its essential story.

Finally, remember that theatre audiences demonstrate a persistent hunger to suspend their disbelief and to participate in a play’s sleight of hand – even when it goes wrong. I once read an interview with a young actor who told a wonderful story about his first professional performance. I can’t remember the exact play but it was a classic – it might have been Romeo and Juliet. The climax of the action required him to fall on his sword and die. This moment had been carefully choreographed in rehearsal so that the actor would fall, in his death throes, on a precise mark where a fountain of fake blood was concealed. This would release on impact and bloody his shirt, creating the effect of the fatal wound.

One night the actor, to his horror, missed his mark, and fell to the floor some way from the fountain. He had no choice but to die on the spot without the prop blood, judging that to drag himself several feet to his mark would ruin the verisimilitude of the moment. As he died, the fountain triggered several feet away, sending a spout of blood up into empty space.

The actor, as we can imagine, died a second death of professional mortification and slunk offstage when the curtain fell. And then later, in the bar, he overheard two members of the audience discussing the moment. ‘Wasn’t it incredible,’ one of them remarked, ‘when the man died and blood symbolically jetted into the air. What a brilliant piece of theatre.’

EXERCISES: FINDING THEATRICALITY

1. Instinct questions (feeling your way through)

This set of questions should help you to start exploring some of your conscious and unconscious connections to your material. You don’t have to have a finished draft yet. If it helps to imagine your play here as a physical performance, go ahead. But if you’re not ready to do that, just write down any feelings or impressions you have when you think about your play, even if it’s as yet unwritten. Either way, try to answer the questions spontaneously, without overthinking your answers. And don’t beat yourself up if you can’t answer them easily. This is meant to be a playful exercise, not a test.

➔What are the colours, smells or tastes of your play? Describe any sensory impressions that come to mind when you summon your story in your mind.

➔Is there any music (featured in the play, or not) that encapsulates the essence of your play?

➔Describe your play as if it were